Craig Delarge

“Because the “traumatic” view of early years so controls psychological theory of personality and its development, the focus of our rememberings and the language of our personal story telling have already been infiltrated by the toxins of these theories. Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods. We are, this book shall maintain, less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter storms may destroy some things, but they also prepare the way for life. If things are swept away, it is appropriate. There must be an opportunity for new living things to emerge and begin their own cycle.”
― Ming-Dao Deng, 365 Tao: Daily Meditations

“Wetiko is a parasitic spirit or thought-form. It is highly destructive and is motivated by greed, selfishness and excessive consumption. It infects people like a virus, literally possessing them. Once it has taken hold of someone, it deludes them into thinking that consuming the life-force and energy of others for self-aggrandisement or profit is a natural and admirable way to live, and steers them into living a predatory and parasitic lifestyle; essentially, cannibalising other people and the planet.”
― Paul Francis, The Shamanic Journey: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Shamanism